I find your view very interesting. You have a very capitalist and US law based perspective on it. For one, not everything in a society needs to allow to "collect the fruits" of individual work (which is essentially capitalism). Europe has much more socialism mixed into their understanding of their societies than the US.
Further, the US law is based on risks of heavy punishments but few regulations, while the law in many parts of Europe is based on strict regulations but less high fines. It looks like the EU has too many rules, but that is a subject of perspective.
Problem here: The internet gives a shit about borders and society.
Please don't just say this is a US perspective. This is a sociopaths perspective that the current US legal system promotes due to the machinations of the same group of sociopaths.
Every business owner here who would complain about how the GPDR is taking their rights to their personally earned data away would be the same people who launch a lawsuit because one of their competitior's products had a typeface that was vaguely similar to theirs
There are regular people here, they just don't go starting businesses that have abusing their customers as a business model because they couldn't sleep at night if they did that
Targeted ads hardly qualify as abuse to me. Getting to use a website for free in exchange for your browsing data being analyzed is a great deal and a win/win for everybody.
Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though.
It's not just targeted ads. We see a new data breaches every week that leaks customer data and is used in identity theft that causes actual, quantifiable damages to users. The entire internet, and increasingly physical goods in our homes, has become the equivalent of a ghetto where every single person has to have bars on their doors and look over their shoulders constantly to avoid having shit stolen from them or their privacy violated.
The GDPR didn't arise out of some feeling that companies we're making too much money. It arose out of the fact that the industry refused to self regulate. They were given years to do this and the standard operating procedure for security around data right now is to lol because who cares if you have a breach, that's a problem for the people you harvested data from, not you.
The bad side effects from this data harvesting are called negative externalities. A similar set of negative externalities is pollution.
Do you think it's immoral for regulations to make certain business model that rely on dumping poison into the water or air unprofitable, just because those companies could have made some money if only they could do what they liked regardless of the harm to others?
You're not allowed to "degrade the service" or allow access contingent on consent to targeted ads/tracking, so the practice isn't going to be sustainable for websites when only a tiny percentage of users give consent, seeing how they get to use the site one way or the other - have their cake and eat it too.
Implying that the majority of user's wouldn't just instantly click the largest button that says "make this annoying wall of legal text go away" whether that is agreeing to tracking or not?
While the inability to target ads based on data about you and your search history searches removes some amount of advertising income. Websites would still be allowed to show ads, and I would imagine that those ads can be specific to the article currently being viewed.
This is exactly how conventional TV advertising works, just because you don't know the gender, race, political views and entire life story of a website user, doesn't mean you can't get almost the same effect. You can target ads in general at specific content and hit most of the correct users anyway rather than targeting specific users and the content they have viewed in the past.
"The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad."
No one's arguing that the targeted ads don't make more money. We are arguing that the extra value from the ads is not worth violating everyone's privacy.
A quote I heard recently is "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." That's what the tone towards small businesses/websites in relation to GDPR sounds like to me. I can't understand valuing this right to the "privacy" of not having your (often anonymized) identity tied to a marketing profile so much that you'd rather some free small websites no longer exist and others move to subscriptions.
I am sorry if I formalized it too general. Like you say, it is purely focused on the law system and unrestricted capitalism, which as an individual you either use or not.
Sociopath is a tough word, but in the original non insulting meaning of deviation from the common society, I think the word is right.
Further, the US law is based on risks of heavy punishments but few regulations, while the law in many parts of Europe is based on strict regulations but less high fines. It looks like the EU has too many rules, but that is a subject of perspective.
Problem here: The internet gives a shit about borders and society.